An empty room full of boxes, an absent mother and two warring sisters. ‘The Backward Fall’ is billed as a play about Alzheimer’s, but it’s less about the mother who suffers from the condition and more about the effect it has on her daughters. The sisters’ relationship reflects […]

A pair of one-act Noel Coward plays make up this double bill—“We Were Dancing” and “The Better Half”—with both taking on the subject of marital affairs. These are both relatively obscure Coward plays, and in fact the latter was never actually published in the playwright’s lifetime, only rediscovered […]

What are the most quoted lines from Hamlet? From Shakespeare, even? “To be, or not to be: that is the question”. So why not, as Lyndsey Turner does in her current production at the Barbican, whip the famous lines out of Act III and push them to the […]

Here’s where I stand on acrobats. (Insert joke here). I like them, I do. They are incredibly fit and strong and do things which an ordinary person not only couldn’t do without a huge injection of talent, but even then couldn’t do without a body transfusion or in […]

Last summer, this group’s offering was The Norman Conquests, a reliable staple of rep and amdram, and by all accounts capably pulled off. Maybe after that success a voice, either imagined or human murmured ‘Good dear, but try something a bit more adventurous next year’. This is it, and […]

Over the weekend, Devon’s summer arts festival Arts on the Move gathered a large audience to the gorgeous and derelict Poltimore House to soak up some culture in the sunshine. Not least among the large range of exhibitors and performers were up-and-coming Exeter youth company, The Young Pretenders. […]

As the country hit election fever-pitch, the capital has been awash with political theatre. Stories of grubby Westminster intrigue have been served to people like me who, for some reason, just can’t get enough of it all. The Candidate comes from The Lab Collective, a company that specialises […]

It’s a strange concept: a play based on a movie script, and an awful script at that. Mark Ravenhill’s 2005 comedy Product, is essentially a pitch for the screenplay Mohammed and Me, a 9/11-inspired drama fuelled by Islamic paranoia and built on a foundation of appalling writing and […]

A lot of amateur theatre these days is very good, and there are reasons for that. The whole process is so time and resource consuming that unless people are really dedicated, really interested in producing an outstanding product, they tend to go and find something else to do […]

Dealing with mental disabilities in drama is no easy task, and Peter Hamilton’s new play, set in a mental hospital, tackles this theme head-on. Its subject is the relationship between two of the patients, whose romantic feelings for each other develop throughout the course of the play. They […]